Review of “COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION)”

Why should an obscure poem like Stéphane Mallarmé’s groundbreaking Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard: Poème (1897) have become the cornerstone of an art-industrial complex of literary, critical and artistic responses ranging from essays, books, edited collections, countless editions, and appropriations in the form of fine press livres d’artiste, book art and sculptures, films and theater, ballets and fado, musical compositions, digital programs and installations, and even pavement art? It was never even produced under Mallarmé’s hand in the form he intended. We have the poet’s manuscripts and proofs. We have his son-in-law’s efforts with the publisher Éditions de la Nouvelle Révue Française (NRF) in 1914 to present Un Coup de Dés in accordance with Mallarmé’s plans. In many ways, their liberty of including the preface from the 1897 Cosmopolis version so unsatisfactory to the poet paved the way for artistic/editorial interventions and art-industrial complex to come.

With this exhibition and edited catalogue COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION) at the New York Center for Book Arts, Michalis Pichler does not so much ignore the question as answer it by extending the art-industrial complex. The exhibition and catalogue are more than a mere display and list of over 150 works. Taken together and with his own artistic practices, they represent a multi-faceted artwork in its own right. The core constituent of this artwork is Pichler’s extensive collection of editions of Un Coup de Dés, critical works and the numerous instances of the century-plus of appropriations, including his own, of the poem. In effect, Pichler has developed the activity of collecting, appropriating and publishing into an artistic practice.

(COLLECTION) is the second and further developed instance of Pichler’s practice. The first occurred in Milan in 2016 with an invitation card appropriating the format and title of Marcel Broodthaers’ Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé at the Wide White Space in Antwerp in 1969. Pichler appropriated not only the title and card of Broodthaers’ exhibition, he appropriated its content, redisplaying Broodthaers’ landmark UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (IMAGE) and many of the editions of the poem that Broodthaers had included.

Top: Invitation to Marcel Broodthaers’ Exposition Littéraire autour de Mallarmé at the Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp, December 1969; image courtesy of MACBA. Bottom: Invitation to Michalis Pichler’s Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé, Kunstverein Milano and Il Lazzaretto, 14 December 2016 – 28 January 2017.; with permission of Michalis Pichler.

With its introduction of his landmark (IMAGE), Broodthaers’ exhibition marked a transformative moment for the Mallarméan art-industrial complex. By blotting out the lines of Mallarmé’s poem with strips of black ink, Broodthaers elevated image over text. In its wake, we have had

Jérémie Bennequin’s (OMAGE DÉ-COMPOSITION), (OMAGE) and (FILM)
Raffaella della Olga’s (CONSTELLATION), (PERMUTATION) and (TRAME)
Sammy Engramer’s (ONDE) or (WAVE)
Benjamin Lord’s (SEQUENCE)
Michael Maranda’s (LIVRE)
Richard Nash’s (ESPACE)
Aurélie Noury’s (RUBIK’S CUBE) and (POSTER)
Michalis Pichler’s (SCULPTURE) and (MUSIQUE)
Sam Sampson’s (((SUN-O)))
Klara Vith’s (DISCOURS I-III)
Eric Zboya’s 2018 (VECTEUR) and (TRANSLATIONS)

Like Broodthaers’ (IMAGE), each of these appropriations remakes the poem (and sometimes a previous artist’s remaking) through its parenthetically indicated tag. For instance, Pichler’s (SCULPTURE) replaces Mallarmé’s pages with plexiglas sheets and Broodthaer’s blottings with abrasions. But Pichler’s parenthetical tag (COLLECTION) is omnivorous. It consumes again Broodthaers’ Exposition, eating Mallarmé’s poem in its several incarnations; devours all the parenthetical appropriators, including (SCULPTURE); swallows the many other appropriators lacking a parenthetical tag; and picks its teeth with works that merely allude to the poem’s title.

The reverse of Pichler’s displayed print Bibliophagia (2024) reveals this cannibalistic metaphor as central to the artistic practice that yields (COLLECTION) as an artwork in its own right. Visitors may miss the import of the print’s reverse side until leaving the exhibition because that side is not displayed, although it can be found on the free copy offered onsite.

Pichler’s 2016 and 2024 exhibitions add another constituent practice to this project: that of performance art, but with the visitor as performer. Like a work of performance art, an exhibition has a venue and displays that serve as the stage setting. Performance art and exhibitions are both time-delimited, fixed within the period and hours of the venue’s availability. Where the length of a performance is constrained by the artist/performer’s stamina, this exhibition’s is constrained by the visitor’s stamina. Fortunately with Pichler’s performances, a less-than-indefatigable visitor has something other than a leaflet of performance notes as guide and souvenir: the volume COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION): Books and Ideas after Mallarmé. This volume’s three essays and two book excerpts work together with the snapshots of the exhibition to put forward this premise that (COLLECTION) is intended as an artistic work in its own right.

COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION): Books and Ideas after Mallarmé (2024)
Michalis Pichler (ed.)
Perfect bound paperback. H240 x W170 mm. 280 pages. Acquired from AHA-Buch, 22 January 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

In addition to recapitulating the Bibliophagia manifesto, Pichler’s introductory essay provides the background to the appearance and editioning of Un Coup de Dés and also explains the relevance of the two book-excerpts. Pichler’s translation with Misaki Kawabe from Ryōko Sekiguchi’s book”Nagori” is welcome apart from any role it plays in (COLLECTION). As a concept, nagori has popped up in book art with Victor Burgin’s 2020 essay “Nagori: Writing with Barthes” and with Nagori (2023), a sculptural artist’s book by Ximena Pérez Grobet and and Kati Riquelme. Depending on context, nagori can mean the ephemeral imprint of withdrawing waves, a late-season wistfulness for the taste of early-season fruit or tea, what remains after the passing of a person, an object, an event, or the atmosphere of something missing. Pichler ties this to the absence of an authoritative edition of the poem.

The sense of something missing also comes up in the second book excerpt: Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre’s Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities (Polity, 2020). Pichler enlists them to establish what distinguishes a collection from a heap on the one hand and a stockpile on the other (pp.73-90), not merely accumulating items in a collection but curating according to governing principles, similarities, differences, and the feel for what is missing. (Recall the “missing” bird on both sides of Bibliophagia above?) In a sense, the act of collection or curation is a form of appropriation, and in that sense, Pichler’s governing principle of collection has been the appropriation of appropriations but always with a hungry eye for the next. To paraphrase Bibliophagia, Pichler has made many acquaintances and chosen but a few as his favorite meal.

Here, Annette Gilbert’s essay chimes in to assert that “curating has now ascended to a full-fledged artistic practice in its own right” where “literary curators are also increasingly succeeding in creating ‘a new artist-like identity’ for themselves and inscribing their ‘collections’ as autonomous works of their own right in their own oeuvre, of which Michalis Pichler’s COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION) … is a striking example.” (p.52)

Tellingly, Gilbert’s assertion comes in the context of mapping the field of “appropriation literature” as a manifestation of the pressures of an affluent society giving rise to “new strategies of artistic production and the creation of meaning” (p.29), echoing Felix Stalder’s observation: “in the digital condition, one of the methods (if not the most fundamental method) enabling humans to participate […] in the collective negotiation of meaning is the system of creating references.” (p.31) And what is Pichler’s collecting if not a systematic creation of references among the works in (COLLECTION)?

Craig Dworkin’s essay bizarrely and brilliantly connects Mallarmé with another system of creating references: Alphonse Bertillon’s identification system for the Parisian Préfecture de Police. Not only did the Bertillon system overlap with Mallarmé in the 19th century, it turns out that its principles map directly onto Mallarmé’s conception of Le Livre as stacks of unbound sheets filed in the cubbyholes of a filing cabinet and awaiting a theatrical performance of a séance leader’s withdrawing sheets to arrive at a poem (rather than the flic‘s pulling them to arrive at the identification of a suspect). Dworkin goes on to make convincing links to Klaus Scherübel’s styrofoam edition of Le Livre, to Dan Graham’s “Poem Schema”, to Ernest Fraenkel’s Les Dessins trans-conscients de Stéphane Mallarmé, to Mario Diacono’s and Marcel Broodthaers’ blotted versions of the poem, to Derek Beaulieu’s tattered sails (after un coup de des), and to Rainier Lericolais’ and Michalis Pichler’s die-cut perforations, among others. All of which leads to Dworkin’s assured conclusion: “The editions and appropriations of UN COUP DE DÉS alone are substantial enough to have led to an exhibition, and a sense of the assembled collection, UN COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION), as an artistic work in its own right.” (p.67)

The “Catalog” section, which includes over 150 pages of images of book covers and spreads variously at 1:5, 1:2 and 1:1 scale against a black background, presents more items than are displayed in the exhibition. One of them is Pichler’s editorial intervention in that very first editorial intervention in the poem: the PRÉFACE required of Mallarmé in 1897 by Cosmopolis and reproduced by his son-in-law in the 1914 edition. Here Pichler’s annotations call out 10 key aspects of the poem and Mallarmé’s thoughts about it that would lead to the overlapping industry of artistic homage, appropriation, expropriation, transculturation, transvaloration and cannibal translation or bibliophagia as Pichler variously puts it.

This contribution from Pichler not only echoes many of Annette Gilbert’s points in mapping the field of appropriation literature but also confirms her assertion: “Pichler’s project … positions itself decidedly both as an independent artistic work and as artistic research, which demonstratively opens itself up to chance and serendipity through its collection policy – in resonance with a dice roll as the object of the collection ….” (p.39).

COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION) — the bookwork — belongs in any library with an interest in Mallarmé, book art or the cutting edge of contemporary art. The exhibition at the Center for Book Arts closes on 1 May 2024. Copies of the catalogue for sale remain on hand as do free copies of the print Bibliophagia (2024) and the invitation from Pichler’s 2016 Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé.

As with the 2016 exhibition, the majority of items on display were accessible, making the exhibition a rare hands-on experience.

Courtesy of Center for Book Arts

Before the opening, the poem was chalked onto the floor of the main display room. Within minutes of the opening, the visitor traffic had erased most of it.

On the wall: Bibliophagia, 2016 and 2024. Hanging: UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (SCULPTURE) 2016;
Against the wall: UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (MUSIQUE) 2009
Michalis Pichler

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (MUSIQUE) 2009
Michalis Pichler

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (RUBIK’S CUBE) 2005; UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (POSTER) 2008
Aurélie Noury

Paul Heimbach was perhaps the first after Marcel Broodthaers to use translucent paper in an artist’s book interpretation of Mallarmé’s poem. In würfelwürfe, for each roll of the dice, the results on the upper faces appear on a recto page, the results on the bottom faces appear on the verso.

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Declaration of interest: COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION): Books and Ideas after Mallarmé kindly cites Books On Books’ “‘Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira l’Appropriation’ — An Online Exhibition“.

Books On Books Collection – Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 3 on Folds

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Now here’s a rare thing — a journal issue that requires a video to show the reader h0w to open it.

Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 3 on Folds
Simon Morris, Gill Partington and Adam Smyth (eds.)
Printed boards over recurring origami square-base folded leaves. 300 x 300 mm. 120 pages. ISSN: 2634-7210. Acquired from Information as Material, 29 November 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. [Front and back covers, Kimsooja’s bottari artwork commissioned for Inscription 3.]

The structure is built on the simple principle of an origami square base. A diagonal mountain fold bisects two corners of a square, followed by two perpendicular valley folds bisecting the edges of the square; then the north, south and west corners come together and down atop the east corner. For the printer, the not-so-simple principle is how one base connects to the next to make a book!

Inscription 3 has ten essays, including the editors’ introduction. As seen below, the latter neatly fits with the issue’s table of contents on a single unfolded sheet in a layout that offers considerable creative opportunities for structure and design to enact the theme of the issue.

The essays fall across eleven of these large unfolded sheets, with a twelfth sheet serving for the contributors’ biographies and description of the nine commissioned artworks shrinkwrapped with this journal issue. In general, each unfolded sheet breaks down into quadrants, and each quadrant breaks down into three columns to accommodate text and images. The designers run images across columns, across the vertical and horizontal folds dividing the quadrants and, later on, even in alignment with the diagonal fold.

The structure and layout of Inscription 3 take the star billing in this issue and, to varying degrees, interact with the content. Two essays in particular highlight this. In the issue’s first contributed essay (see above), Craig Dworkin and the editors seem to have conspired to present an essay that enfolds its subject with the design of Incription 3. While Dworkin’s essay explores Stéphane Mallarmé’s efforts to reconcile his ideal of the Book with his ambivalent inspiration for it from the spaciousness of newspaper print, it has to be read across a sheet of book paper unfolded like a Sunday newspaper spread out on the dining room table. To reveal the end of the essay, the sheet of pages must rise, fold and unfold like the wings of a bird. Compare that with Dworkin’s description of Mallarmé’s imagined fusion of newspaper and book in which his landmark poem Un Coup de Dés should appear:

Curving from their center fold like wings, the newspaper sheets in flight through the park – animated by the breeze and wafting like a feather from the birds they mimic – corroborate the operation of the mobile new book, in which the pages assume the rhythmic function of verse itself, abstracted and projected onto the architecture of the assembled volume with folded sheets smoothed into the single surface Un Coup de dés describes with the phrase insinuation simple [simple insinuation], where the etymology derives from the Latin insinuare [to fold in].

The second example coinciding with Inscription 3‘s structure and layout is Justine Provino’s “0, 1, 2, many folds”, which explores an artist’s book just as abstruse semantically and physically as Mallarmé’s poem:

What is the common denominator between the DNA of the fruitfly, the codex-form book and a floppy disk? They all fold. In a particular turn of events in the year 1992, DNA, codex and floppy disk managed to fold over each other through the collaborative making of the artist’s book Agrippa (a book of the dead), famous – or infamous – for the self-destructive intent programmed into it by its makers …

Agrippa (a book of the dead) by Dennis Ashbaugh, Kevin Begos, Jr. and William Gibson incorporates each of these elements, as Provino creatively and critically explains, in ways that ask

… what can – or should – an object that we call ‘book’ look like, and what purpose should it serve? We may easily visualise how pages of paper can be folded into a codex-form book to communicate and preserve reading matter. But can we establish an analogy between this topology underlying the functioning of a codex and the structures of DNA and floppy disk? Can we speak of ‘material texts’ (or even ‘books’) in the context of DNA and floppy disk in the way that we do for the codex?

As soon as the double helix of DNA structure is raised, the reader turning the pages of Inscription 3 will surely have a frisson of recognition.

The skill with which the structure and layout enhances the essays’ content presents a challenge to the nine standalone works of commissioned art. They are individually delightful, but only Daniel Jackson’s into and out of integrates with Inscription 3 “physically”, and then only by virtue of its augmented reality nature that works when pointed at artist Kimsooja’s bottari fabric art commissioned for the front and back covers.

First row: Daniel Jackson, into and out of; Pavel Büchler, Translate Here. Second row: Rick Adams & Simon Morris, Less is More. Third row: Eleanor Vonne Brown, War Unfolding. Fourth row: Marjorie Welish, Indecidability of the Sign; Erica Baum, Embrace. Fifth row: Daniel Starza Smith, Jana Dambrogio, Jessica Spring, and the Unlocking History research group (Letterlocked), It’s a Wonderful World [self-enveloping letter]. Sixth row: Abigail Reynolds, The Red Library. Last row: Nikos Stavropoulos, Folds [vinyl LP record jacket and sleeve, sides A and B].

One more point about structure and a pointer for the reader. This issue manages to include twelve diptychs on the reverse of the twelve large unfolded sheets. Each diptych presents a figure, diagram or list on one half and a sizable corresponding label on the other half. Getting to them is the trick not explained in the video.

Top-down edge view of figures, diagrams and lists. How to see them and their labels?

With a large unfolded sheet in view, turn (carefully!) the left half to the right. There is the label below the front cover. Now turn the whole over. There is the figure, diagram or list above the back cover. The figures, diagrams and lists deal with works by Samuel Beckett, Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, Laurence Sterne, Daniel Spoerri, Guillaume Apollinaire, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau and (below) Christine Brooke-Rose.

By the way, the large unfolded sheet above is the last of the twelve in Inscription 3. In addition to providing the biographies of the contributors and the list of nine commissioned artworks, it offers one more diagonal flourish from the designers. Call it a cheeky parting kiss.

Books On Books Collection – Emmy van Eijk

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Breaking Waves (2023)

Breaking Waves (2023)
Emmy van Eijk
Sculptural book. 140 x 140 x 40 mm (closed). Unique work. Acquired from Papertrail Handmade Books, 22 January 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Breaking Waves spills over at least three categories of bookmaking: the bound blank book, designer bookbinding and sculpture. It would take a bold owner, however, to use the work in its first category. Fortunately that invitation quickly yields to another.

Photos: Left, Books On Books Collection; Right, Courtesy of the artist.

An invitation to touch and explore the textures of the cover, which consists of tracing paper, whiteboard, acrylic paint, chalk and ecoline. As the book opens, there’s the added invitation to see and feel how its exterior and the spine’s interior mimick waves rising and falling.

Photos: Left, Books On Books Collection; Right, Courtesy of the artist.

Laid flat and viewed from its edge, it can display different levels of water accumulates or diminished with the number of pages turned.

Photos: Books On Books Collection.

As with those sculptures meant to be viewed in the round, it’s hard to settle on an angle that offers the most satisfying view.

Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Images courtesy of the artist

Breaking Waves is one of several works in the Books On Books Collection that manage to capture the stillness as well as the movement, the transparency and always changing character, of water. An appreciation for Van Eijk’s technique and results grows alongside those of Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony in Water, Calling, Helen Douglas in The Pond at Deuchar and Nif Hodgson in Fluid Horizons.

A 2007 graduate of TU Delft in architecture, Emmy van Eijk has been both a practicing architect and, with the founding of Papertrail Handmade Books in 2017, a book artist. It’s no surprise then that several of her works (as yet not for sale) resonate also with the architecture-related works in the Books On Books Collection, would sit proudly with them and provide grist for appreciative comparisons and contrast. Courtesy of the artist, here is one such work.

Expectations (2023)
Emmy Van Eijk

Books On Books Collection – Clotilde Olyff

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Lettered Typefaces and Alphabets by Clotilde Olyff (2000)

Lettered Typefaces and Alphabets by Clotilde Olyff (2000)
Jan Middendorp and Clotilde Olyff
Spiral-bound softcover of 78 pages and measuring H235 x W215 mm with a 28-page booklet measuring H165 x W115 mm bound in. Acquired from Klondyke Books, Almere, NL, 28 November 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection

This is the rare first edition as published by the late Jan Middendorp through his Druk Editions. It bears all the hallmarks of his eye for design — the black coated wired binding, the heavy embossed card cover, the use of color to underscore the text’s theme, the embedded booklet — all nevertheless centering and providing a platform for the art and design of Clotilde Olyff.

Perhaps mostly noted for her pebble alphabet, Olyff should be noted for her Munari-like focus on the relation of the basic forms of circle, triangle and square to the shapes of letters and numbers and her ability to express that in sculpture, book art and games as well as type. Her works, as Middendorp writes in the preface, “are the result of investigations into the essence of the letter, into the mechanisms and conventions that guide our perception”.

In addition to being remembered for his own typographic design and publications, Middendorp is owed a debt of gratitude for collaborating with Clotilde Olyff to document her work.

Books On Books Collection – Nayla Romanos Iliya

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The Phoenician Alphabet (2022)

The Phoenician Alphabet (2022)
Nayla Romanos Iliya (art), Rose Issa, Susan Babaie and Peter Murray (text)
Casebound laminated cover. H205 x W185 mm. 108 pages. Acquired from Les presses du réel, 2 February 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Herodotus first put forward the historical account that Cadmos, a prince from Byblos in today’s Lebanon, brought the Phoenician alphabet to the Greeks in ancient times (anywhere from the 12th to 8th century BCE according to scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries CE). The myth and story of Cadmos — his pursuit of his sister Europa kidnapped by Zeus, his founding the city of Thebes and his delivering the alphabet — are entertainingly recounted in the children’s book There’s a Monster in the Alphabet (2002) by James Rumford. The relative settling on the Semitic origins of Cadmos and the Phoenician alphabet is well covered in Johanna Drucker’s Inventing the Alphabet (2022).

Lebanon’s being the ancient source of this civilizing invention and the site today of ever-present conflict and ever-elusive peace is a challenging irony. Architect and artist Romanos Iliya meets that challenge with works like “On the Other Side of Time” (a soaring public sculpture in Beirut), Flower Power (forms made of concrete, steel and shell casings and splinters), 1001 Lights (an interactive sculpture of light, cubes and Arabic calligraphy) and the Phoenician Alphabet (public sculptures inspired by those shapes that Cadmos brought to capture the sounds of language). The monograph displays these works and more, including the limited edition series called Small Characters that she made for the National Museum of Beirut and the AUB Archaeology Museum.

Small Characters (2014) displayed in The Phoenician Alphabet.

Just as Ron King’s ABC Paperweights have done for the Latin alphabet, Romanos Iliya’s Phoenician letters suggest rather than replicate.

ABC Paperweights [nd]
Ron King
Resin sculptures on painted wooden board Acquired from the artist, 24 July 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Alef, Beth and Gimel from the series Small Characters (2014)
Nayla Romanos Iliya
Sculptures in resin. 130 x 130 mm, variable height.Edition of 100 each, of which these are #26, #16 and #25, respectively. Acquired from the artist, 13 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

These three letters from the Small Characters series arrived too late to be included in the exhibition Alphabets Alive! at the Bodleian in Oxford. Had they arrived in time, however, they might have thrown the exhibition off track. The Alphabets Alive! exhibition began with a focus on artists’ books and the alphabet. A few non-print and non-book works slipped into the cabinets. But so resonant and evocative are these representations of the Phoenician alphabet that they would have — and have — led to a search for other sculptural works. Imagine the completely different and monumental display needed to accommodate these 26 artists alongside Romanos Iliya and King. Enjoy the links.

Hazem el Mestikawy

Dominault Evelyne

Emily Floyd

Glagolitic Alphabet Trail

Thierry Gouttenègre

Ebon Heath

Eric Ho & Kostika Spaho

Takanobu Igarashi

Collene Karcher

Marianne Larsen

Catherine Lesueur

Paco Torres Monsó

Claes Oldenburg

Jaume Plensa

Azza al Qubaisi

Peyton Scott Russell

Nicola Yeoman

Books On Books Collection – Annie Cicale

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Patterned Alphabet (2013)

Patterned Alphabet (2013)
Annie Cicale
Sewn, casebound leporello. H104 x W104 mm. 34 panels. Edition of 41, of which this 26. Artist 4 July 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Patterned Alphabet could well have been entitled Textured Alphabet. The number of different textures almost equals that of the patterns. It is the textures’ interaction with each other as well as with the patterns that particularly appeals. The cover, appropriately made of Cave Paper’s Alphabet Heavyweight, initiates the interplay. While the calligraphic style and patterned background of the copperplate engravings of A and Z do not vary, the textures around and beneath them multiply, mirror and contrast. The surface of the Cave Alphabet paper echoes that of the copperplate’s stippled background. The softness of the thick cotton string, binding the cover, contrasts with the roughness of the paper.

Before coming to the leporello, hand and eye are slowed by another texture. Like the self-referential Cave Alphabet paper cover, the flyleaf refers to itself with a leaf print. It contrasts with the cover, however, in its lightness, surface and color. While that dance of contrasting textures goes on, the flyleaf’s embedded image strikes up its own contrast with the relief technique and letters on the covers.

When the leporello comes on stage, the print pattern and paper texture exchange the roles they played at the beginning. Before, the print pattern held the stillpoint around which the cover, binding string, flyleaf and copperplate danced. Now, the smoother laid texture of the Ingres d’Arches paper becomes the stillpoint. Its weight, surface and color — very different from those of the cover and flyleaf — serve that constancy well. For each letterform (including the ampersand), different patterns make up the anatomy and background, which adds quite a number of dancers around the stillpoint.

The printing technique for all those dancers — Resingrave engraving — contributes to their variety of pattern. Invented by Richard Woodman, Resingrave is a synthetic substitute for boxwood. It consists of a thin layer of resin atop a block of MDF wood and, since the ’90s, was famously used by Barry Moser (e.g., the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible). More than lino or blocks for woodcuts, it allows for the thin lines necessary for close and fine patterns. Standing the leporello against the light offers a chance to enjoy the interaction of the “texture” of those patterns with the texture of the paper.

Like Moser, Cicale has engaged with watercolors as well as prints and embraced the abstract as well as the figurative, as can be seen in the next work.

Detritus No. 30 (2020)

Detritus No. 30: Floppy Alphabet, Brush Alphabet (2020)
Annie Cicale
Modified leporello, pasted to paper cover, bellyband closure. Closed: H95 x W80; Open: W750. 12 panels. Acquired from the artist, 4 July 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Here, Cicale has compiled and collaged cast off letters, ornaments and marks from completed works to create a modified double-sided leporello bound in painted and inked watercolor paper, held together with a belly band. The leporello’s two modifications are its variation in panel size and the cut across the mountain folds. Except for a reversal on the first panel, the upper row’s panels bear square cutouts, and the lower row’s bear circular ones. Although constant in shape and distribution, the recurrent squares and circles vary in their color and size, highlighting the variation in size of panels. With their constant black and gray, the ink-brushed letters A-H contrast with the variance of color and size of the circles and squares.

On the reverse side of the leporello, the circles and squares exchange position. They are, in fact, circular and square patches, black and white on this side of the leporello and colored on the other, supplying the color to the other side’s square and circular cutouts. The circular patches are generally consistent in size, as are the square patches, which contrasts with the varied sizes of the cutouts on the other side. The reverse side of the leporello is more muted, and with its black and white patches, it seems more abstract, but is it? Letters themselves are abstract, which may the tongue-in-cheek point of the underlying patches.

Experiment No. 2 (2023)

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Experiment No. 2: Step by Step (2023)
Annie Cicale
Pamphlet stitch book. H185 x W 130 mm. Seven folios of varying trim size and papers, one set of four folios gathered and sewn to upper fold of spine, one set of three folios gathered and sewn to lower fold of spine. Acquired from the artist, 4 July 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission.

Cicale continues her dance of contrasts and similarities with Experiment No. 2 (2023). Here are some of her comments on process and material:

Teaching watercolor for many years has allowed me to try many exuberant techniques, using good rag paper and a wide gamut of colors, shapes and techniques.… An alphabet written on another sheet of paper has been collaged on these pages. I’ve used walnut ink, watercolor and iridescent pigments, which create an interesting series of contrasts as you move through the book.

Another experimental aspect of this pamphlet stitch book is the gathering of the folios into two separate gathers and the variation in size of the folios. The exterior image of the spine above and its interior below show the attachment of the gatherings to the right and left folds of the spine. Two pamphlets in one.

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The first gathering’s title-bearing folio measures H176 x W246 mm when spread out fully. On its title-bearing page, there is one of the collage elements that Cicale mentions; three others appear on the other half, which is the final page of the first gathering.

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Of course, the full images on either side of the title-bearing folio cannot be seen all at once because of the intervening, contrasting and differently sized folded folios. It’s those different sizes and contrasts that somehow urge the reader/viewer to jump forward then back not only to see those full images for every folio but also to enjoy the magic of the contrasts and similarities. Two of the more effective spreads prompting this jumping forward and backward are these below. On the reverse side of the title-bearing folio is a colorful impasto painting of letters, some in sequence, some overlapping.

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Perhaps it’s the impasto of the verso page that prompts the jump forward to find its recto mate, but once there, the mirrored colors of the pansy and letters surely prompt a jump back to enjoy again the different colors mirrored before.

Below, the truncated alphabet prompts the leap forward to find its other half, and the contrasting wintry calligraphy facing M through Z sends us back to its other half to puzzle over those collaged thumbnail letter I’s.

Mind that all of this has occurred in just the first gathering.

The second gathering has fewer folios and perhaps fewer prompts to jump forward and back, but there is at least one prompt to jump back to the first gathering. The first page of the second gathering recalls from the first gathering the folio of wintry calligraphy — the one above with the two puzzling thumbnail letter I’s.

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Curiously, the second gathering has several more of those thumbnail letter I’s than the first gathering has. In fact, due to the narrowness of the inner folios, the collaged thumbnails are also more constantly present to the eye. In general, the thumbnails and narrow inner folios make the second gathering more about the collage effect and strong contrasts across the differently sized pages and less about jumping forward and back.

When we reach the final page of the second gathering, there sits the thumbnail, almost as if it were the illuminated initial of “Incipit” — except, of course, this is the end.

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Tantalizing and enchanting as those thumbnail letter I’s are, they also draw attention to the experiment’s one jarring folio. It appears in the center of the first gathering and is quirkily the only off-center folio in the whole book. It is also the folio that, with an explicit message, forecloses the surrounding incipience. With that twee red heart beneath the red thread, out the window goes the structural and material subtlety so enjoyable in the rest of the book.

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Books On Books Collection – Kitty Maryatt and Scripps College Students

2023/08/01Books On BooksLeave a comment

Arch (2010)

Arch (2010)
Kitty Maryatt, Jenny Karin Morrill, Ali Standish, Alycia Lang, Jennifer Wineke, Mandesha Marcus, Catherine Wang, Kathryn Hunt, Ilse Wogau, Jennifer Cohen and Winnie Ding
Acrylic slipcase, leporello formed of self-covering booklets sewn together. Slipcase: H410 x W110 x D50. Leporello: H400 x W 90 mm (closed). 64 pages. Unnumbered copy from edition of 109. Acquired from Bromer Booksellers, 7 December 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection

Nôtre-Dame de Paris (1831), Archdeacon Claude Frollo points to the book in his hand and then to the cathedral and says, “This will kill that”. It is ironic that Hugo’s book (popularly known now by its English title The Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame) was written in large part to save the then-decaying cathedral (post-Revolution, it served as a warehouse), and it succeeded. It is also ironic that, while the fictional character’s metaphor has a point about the book’s permanence of replicability outlasting the building’s permanence of stone, it misses the collaborative foundations of both.

Arch (2010), created by ten students at Scripps College under the direction of Kitty Maryatt, reminds us that the creation of a book — even a work of book art — is a collaborative effort. All the students involved in the design, planning and production were women, a happenstance serendipitously blessed ahead of time by a Los Angeles Times article celebrating women architects. Drawing on that article and Maya Lin’s Boundaries (2000) as well as other research, the students agreed on a mission statement for the work: “Architecture, like books, is a deliberate balancing act between stability and motion, interior and exterior, aesthetic values and practicalities. Books, like buildings, are fundamentally inhabited spaces. They are incomplete without human interaction.”

Clever structural use of paper with a stone-like appearance, paired with apt choices of text matched with equally judicious choices in typography, evoke the similarities between books and buildings. Each architect/bookmaker’s contribution is a self-covering booklet in leporello format. Of different heights, the booklets are sewn together to create a tiered tower to be housed in an acrylic slipcase.

The first booklet, open below, incorporates Maryatt’s introduction, entitled “Blueprint”, all of which appears in the work’s entry in the publication Sixty over Thirty: Bibliography of Books Printed Since 1986 at the Scripps College Press (2016). The entry is reproduced in full further below.

The next booklet lists the sources of architectural inspiration, and as the lattice door on the list’s facing page turns, two sets of stairs, cutouts in contrasting colors, ascend on the verso page to the text that begins at the top of the recto page and ends at the foot of descending stairs on the next double-panel spread. Like Maya Lin, Maryatt’s students built their works by learning to think with their hands. The reader, too, has to think with the hands to experience fully this booklet and those that follow. The whole work conjures up the titles of Juhani Pallasmaa’s books — The Thinking Hand and The Embodied Image. Readers of this online entry will have to expand the images below, enjoy the words and imagine their way through with the title of another of his books — The Eyes of the Skin.

Books On Books Collection – Květa Pacovská

2023/07/192023/08/30Books On BooksLeave a comment

À l’infini (2007)

À l’infini (2007)
Květa Pacovská
Softcover with protective Mylar attached, exposed spine, sewn with multicolored threads. 270 x 270 x 29 mm. 128 pages. Acquired from Rakuten, 25 November 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The Buzz Lightyear character of Toy Story and his catchphrase “To infinity and beyond” arrived in 1995. While it seems unlikely that the catchphrase influenced Květa Pacovská, the audience for Á l’infini (2007) and that for Toy Story definitely overlap. In her invitation below, Pacovská explicitly addresses the youngest of her audience: Tu peux regarder chaque lettre, toucher chaque lettre, considérer chaque lettre de façon formelle ou lire chaque lettre à haute voix. Chaque lettre a son propre son, sa propre forme et sa propre couleur. Note leurs différences quand tu les prononces, quand tu écoutes le son de ta voix. [You can look at each letter, touch each letter, consider each letter formally, or read each letter aloud. Each letter has its own sound, shape and color. Note their differences when you pronounce them, when you listen to the sound of your voice.] Above all — literally at the top of the page — she urges the reader: Dis la lettre <<A>> à haute voix jusqu’à ce qu’elle heurte les murs qui l’entourent. [Say the letter “A” out loud until it knocks down the walls surrounding it.], which is what the cut-out A plays outs.

For Pacovská, letters are “the architecture of pleasure”, and À l’infini invites us to play with them in “her city of paper”. Her invitation notes alternative approaches to the book, but the suggestion to walk through it as a paper sculpture is the best and appeal to the child in everyone.

With its collage of cut-outs, pop-ups, spot varnishes, reflective silver ink, letters and, later in the book, numbers, À l’infini is a joyful visual city. Pacovská received the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1992 for her illustration.

Books On Books Collection – Kevin M. Steele

2023/07/182023/08/18Books On BooksLeave a comment

The Movable Book of Letterforms (2009)

The Movable Book of Letterforms (2009)
Kevin M. Steele
Pop-up book. 210 x 210 mm. 22 pages. Edition of 3. Acquired from the artist, November 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

Letterforms have a tangibility that exceeds their two-dimensional representation on paper and even on screen. How better to educate the viewer to their tactility and three-dimensionality than with movable book techniques such as the volvelle, pop-ups, flaps and tab pulls?

The Movable Book of Letterforms (2009) is a work of art that does just that: it enacts a basic introduction to the origins and unique characteristics of letterforms. A limited edition of three, all of its movable parts have been cut and assembled by hand. The printing is digital on Mohawk Superfine 80lb, and the box and book are covered in Laval velour bookcloth debossed with polymer plate. The only element the artifact is missing is metal.

For a monumental display of Steele’s book and paper engineering, a visit in the UK to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich is urged. It can also be found in the following collections:

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg
University of Iowa, Iowa City
Indiana University, Bloomington
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo
Michigan State University, East Lansing

Books On Books Collection – Connie Stricks

2023/07/092023/07/10Books On BooksLeave a comment

A Cuneiform Hornbook (2023)

A Cuneiform Hornbook (2023)
Connie Stricks
Box: H340 x W233 x D57 mm. Horn-book: H333 x W85 x D40 mm. Leather pouch: H77 x W60 x D25 mm. Tokens: Variable 20 x 25 mm. Colophon folio: H101 x W71 mm. Unique edition. Acquired from the artist, 26 June 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with the artist’s permission.

Connie Stricks has re-imagined the horn-book with found objects, leather craft, clay inscription and sculpture. Prompted by a workshop challenge, the artist found an echo of the earliest writing system — cuneiform — in the scars and cuts of a discarded saw horse.

On the smooth side of the block of saw horse wood, she has carved out a shallow rectangle large enough to hold a small clay tablet she has inscribed with cuneiform marks. Like the traditional horn-book with its pared sheet of cow horn tacked down over the ABCs to protect the letters from wear and tear, the Cuneiform Hornbook has a sheet of clear plastic over the tablet. Stricks may also be having a bit of fun, hinting at the usual under-glass view we have of ancient artifacts.

The small bag of tokens nods toward the predominant assumption that cuneiform marks were developed to meet the accounting and administrative needs of Mesopotamian civilizations building on the underpinnings of agrarian and trade societies. The irregularly shaped tokens have marks on both sides. As trade grew, so grew the need for trust, and tokens indicating an exchange would be sealed in a clay purse (bullae) bearing a cuneiform-inscribed description of the contents.

An amusing “found-object” feature of A Cuneiform Hornbook lies in its packaging and storage. The snug, almost vacuum-like fit will be familiar to some. Confirmation for them and revelation for everyone else appear on the outside of the base.

Like a MacBook Air, the multiple parts nestle among styrofoam blocks, and the leather pouch of tokens and small folio bearing the colophon are enclosed in the usual clear self-sealing cellophane envelopes. And now that MIT scientists have developed an AI transliterator and translator for Akkadian, the Cuneiform Hornbook’s reader need not worry about technological obsolescence.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Sculptural object

Review of “COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION)”

Books On Books Collection – Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 3 on Folds

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Emmy van Eijk

Breaking Waves (2023)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Clotilde Olyff

Lettered Typefaces and Alphabets by Clotilde Olyff (2000)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Nayla Romanos Iliya

The Phoenician Alphabet (2022)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Annie Cicale

Patterned Alphabet (2013)

Detritus No. 30 (2020)

Experiment No. 2 (2023)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Kitty Maryatt and Scripps College Students

Arch (2010)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Květa Pacovská

À l’infini (2007)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Kevin M. Steele

The Movable Book of Letterforms (2009)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Connie Stricks

A Cuneiform Hornbook (2023)

Further Reading